With improved technology and sharply reduced digital camera pricing, digital photography is rapidly replacing traditional film photography. With digital photography, there is no waiting for photographic film to be processed. Instead, most digital cameras allow the photographer to instantly review the digitally captured images. With this ability, the photographer may take another shot if he or she is not satisfied with the first digital images.
Digital photography has given amateur digital photographers new avenues of image distribution. Amateur digital photographs can easily be published on the world-wide web (WWW) to allow anyone on the Internet to view the digital photographs. Internet users can also email digital photographs as attachments or embedded within HTML formatted email messages.
One of the most powerful aspects of digital photography is ability to perform digital image processing. Digital mage processing programs can be used to manipulate digital photographs in order to correct flaws, modify colors, etc. However, the potential of digital image processing by amateurs remains largely unrealized. The only digital image processing used by most amateur digital photographers is the rotation of digital images to correct the orientation of the image. Digital image processing largely remains the domain of experts since quality image processing software is often too expensive for the amateur photographer and too difficult to use for the casual user.
To better realize the great potential of amateur digital photography, it would be very desirable to have improved digital image processing tools that are available for amateur digital photography enthusiasts. These digital image processing tools should be very simple to use yet provide powerful features for manipulating digital images.